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| Rothko, No. 2 |
Speaking of art…I was talking to someone a ways back about art, and we got into a debate about it. I actually started arguing that art is math. And in many ways, it is.
Think of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, perfect and beautiful because of his proportions. Everything that is beautiful is numbers.
Music is nothing but rules, knowing which chords sound right together, and how they pair well together. And yes, sometimes there are dissonant pairings, or two notes that shouldn’t go together and evoke a sense of stress to the music. They stretch a note and make it deeper and tense. But you can’t get a dissonant chord without knowing which rules to break (Think Eric Whitacre). Notes are numbers. Solfege is often in numbers. Time signatures are in numbers. Note lengths are in numbers. It’s all math, albeit emotional, beautiful math.
And art. So much of drawing and painting is about the geometry of the contents. Modern art would be the exception, but as my boyfriend likes to say, modern art is just one big “F you” to the art industry. It isn’t that the rules for aesthetics aren’t there; they’re just deliberately ignored in order to prompt an emotional response in the viewer.
I was walking through MoMA with my grandmother (who, it’s worth mentioning, is very old-school, Catholic and traditional). Nearly everything that I enjoyed—Rothko, Warhol, Klimt, photography—she said was ugly. She didn’t even recognize Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” It isn’t art, she claimed. And she even left the room at one point, while I stood there trying to decipher Rothko’s abstract lines and dots. But that kind of response is art, no? Art can and should evoke a response, good or bad. Any artist that is featured in the MoMA knows the rules. They’ve studied art presumably all their lives. They know the rules, but deliberately break them.
The MoMA is a building of dissonance, echoing off the exhibit walls. But it’s still all math.
